Why do so many industrial companies fail with email marketing? In my opinion, it’s because they do not understand the proper role of email in the marketing mix.
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All too often, companies make the mistake of treating email as a “prospecting tool” – sending unsolicited email to people they don’t know about products that are of no interest to them. In other words, they are “spammers.” Another shortcoming occurs when companies use email only as a “sales tool” — blasting offers and promotions to customers, often in a non-targeted way. While this may produce a few sales hits here and there, it’s not the best way to build strong relationships with customers.
To be successful with email marketing, you need to think of email as a “nurturing tool” — a tool for strengthening relationships with existing customers and prospects in the pipeline. One of the best ways to nurture relationships with email is by producing an educational email newsletter. Email marketing with a monthly e-newsletter offers you an opportunity to build an ongoing, interactive dialogue with your customers and prospects in a measurable, cost-effective way. By sending timely articles that solve current business problems, you show your customers that you understand their needs. This repeatedly reinforces their importance to you and builds trust in your company.
To ensure your email newsletter is a success, I recommend you leverage the following best practices.
Ask Permission and Do What You’re Told
The key to effective email marketing lies in a notion known as “permission marketing.” Your email newsletter should build goodwill with your customers, not annoy them. Therefore, you should obtain permission from your customers and prospects before adding them to your email marketing list. Make sure you have an obvious email signup form on your every page of your Website. Also, any time you speak with a customer or prospect, let them know about your e-newsletter and ask permission to add them to your list.
Create Relevant, Customer-Focused Content
Your email newsletter is not for you – it’s for your customers. You need to focus less on your company and more on the issues and ideas your customers are interested in. I like articles that focus on “how to” tips, best practices and actionable strategies. The following are examples of customer-focused email newsletter content:
- Problems and solutions – Identify common problems that your customers face and provide ideas on how to solve them.
- Lists and tips – Provide actionable lists and tips with titles that begin like “Seven Steps to…” or “The Top Five Ways to…”
- Technological developments – Let your customers know how to leverage recent technological developments to be more effective.
- Industry news and trends – Identify developments in your industry that your customers can take advantage of.
- Case studies – Write case studies of how others have improved their operations, including actionable details your customers can put to work.
Make Sure Your Articles are Short and Scannable
The best email newsletter articles are between 500 and 750 words of text. Also, since people scan information online before they read it in detail, make your articles easy to scan by breaking up the text into manageable chunks and use bullet points and bolded headers to highlight important content.
Make a Relevant Call to Action
Even though the focus of your email newsletter is to educate customers and prospects, this is a great opportunity to present them with relevant offers to generate leads and sales or encourage Website visits. I like to see email newsletters be 80% educational and 20% promotional. The majority of the newsletter should be useful educational information, while the sidebar is presenting your readers with an attractive offer that is relevant to the article content.
Use an Email Campaign Management System
Don’t use your personal email account for email broadcasts. An email marketing campaign management system will help you automate the entire process of building your lists, designing and delivering your messages and measuring the success of your campaigns. Lower-end systems, like Constant Contact, provide great base-level capabilities at an affordable price. Higher-end systems, like ExactTarget, provide more advanced capabilities like dynamic content, automated trigger emails, advanced reporting, etc.
Measure Your Email Marketing Success
As with all marketing activities, you must measure success to see how well you performed in the past, as well as identify actionable strategies to improve your results in the future. When using an email marketing campaign management system, you will have access to great reports that will allow you to track the key metrics to measure the success of your email marketing campaign. In addition, a great way to find out if your e-newsletter is a success is to regularly ask your customers for feedback.
If you are interested in learning more about how to be successful with email marketing, visit www.svmsolutions.com/email and download SVM’s free Email Marketing Guide.
Bob DeStefano is an online marketing strategist and professional speaker with over 15 years experience helping industrial companies leverage online marketing to produce bottom-line results. Bob is president of SVM E-Business Solutions and can be reached by calling 1-877-786-3249 x3 or on the Web at www.svmsolutions.com.
